{"id":99588,"date":"2025-08-28T22:45:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T22:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/99588\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T22:45:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T22:45:07","slug":"the-toxic-avenger-review-peter-dinklage-crushes-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/99588\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Toxic Avenger\u2019 Review: Peter Dinklage Crushes It"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nothing makes me feel older than the inescapable, soul-crushing passage of time, which waits for no one and marches ever forward, towards \u2014 without any exceptions \u2014 our lonely deaths. But coming in second I would say it\u2019s probably Troma, the little independent movie studio that could. And what it could do, was sleaze. Cheap, scuzzy, prurient sleaze with, somehow, a pervasive air of naivet\u00e9 that miraculously made every production kind of cute. \u201cOh look, that guy just got disemboweled and his small intestine was used as a jump rope!\u201d we used to say. \u201cThat\u2019s adorable!\u201d<\/p>\n

Troma\u2019s star doesn\u2019t twinkle as brightly anymore, but for decades it successfully positioned itself as the anti-Hollywood, selling the notion that America was just a toxic waste dump filled with greedy capitalists, evil bullies and innocent victims who, sometimes, became mutant heroes. Not fun mutants with daggers on their hands or laser vision. No, Troma mutants were frozen in time at the moment their faces melted off. Troma\u2019s signature creation, the ultraviolent childlike vigilante The Toxic Avenger<\/a>, was a physically revolting beast with a heart of gold. Unless you were evil, of course. The presence of evil threw Toxie into a murderous rage, so he treated do-badders like they were defective Stretch Armstrongs full of strawberry jam.<\/p>\n

The Toxic Avenger was, somehow, briefly a multimedia sensation. After three films that were so violent you couldn\u2019t find a cable network willing to run them before 1am, Toxie had his own kids cartoon series called \u201cToxic Crusaders.\u201d<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have counterculture franchises like \u201cThe Toxic Avenger\u201d anymore. I wish we did. Heck, if Hollywood had its way we might not even have Macon Blair\u2019s new reboot. The new \u201cToxic Avenger\u201d played at film festivals two whole years ago and it\u2019s struggled to find distribution ever since. That may have something to do with how outlandishly violent it is, but it sure as hell can\u2019t be because it\u2019s a bad movie. Because it\u2019s a pretty great movie, and exactly the kind of good-natured scuzz that could still become a cult sensation.<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe Toxic Avenger\u201d stars Peter Dinklage as Winston Gooze, a single father struggling to raise his son Wade (Jacob Tremblay) in St. Roma\u2019s Village, a town so dilapidated by neglect and toxic waste that all the signs have faded. Now they just read \u201cTromaville.\u201d Winston works for Bob Garbinger (Kevin Bacon), who runs a chemical plant that\u2019s giving everyone in Tromaville cancer. When Winston finds out he\u2019s dying he begs Bob for help with his lousy health insurance. When that fails, Winston tries to rob the factory, but it all goes bad.<\/p>\n

You see, Bob is evil as hell, and a whistleblower named J.J. (Taylour Paige) is trying to steal evidence that will destroy his company. So Bob tells his gross little brother Fritz (Elijah Wood) to kill her, and Bob sends an evil monstercore rock band to do the deed. Winston gets in the way, gets tossed into the toxic waste, and becomes a bright green vigilante who rips the arms off of mobsters, rips the faces off of right wing terrorists, and rips a stream of acid urine whenever he has to go number one.<\/p>\n

Nobody plays a sad sack quite like Peter Dinklage, so casting the \u201cGame of Thrones\u201d star was a stroke of genius. But that\u2019s not him in the Toxic Avenger costume. Dinklage dubs the voice, Darth Vader-style, but after his transformation Toxie is physically played by Luisa Guerreiro, a prolific performer with credits on everything from \u201cTeletubbies\u201d to \u201cBaldur\u2019s Gate III.\u201d Together they create a wonderful illusion, a complete character sculpted out of two partial performances. Their Toxie is a creature of tragedy who doesn\u2019t always achieve catharsis through his acts of violence. Usually he finds them slightly embarrassing.<\/p>\n

Macon Blair is better known as an actor, having starred in the excellent indie thriller \u201cBlue Ruin.\u201d He also directed the acclaimed \u201cI Don\u2019t Feel at Home in This World Anymore.\u201d Like many filmmakers who got their start on the indie circuit, Blair got swooped up to make a superhero movie. Unlike most of his peers, Blair made a weird and gross one, which demonstrates his canny understanding not just of the title character but the whole Troma vibe. Everything about this movie is unclean. Nobody can pour a drink without sloshing it around and making a mess. The down-to-earth lo-fi Troma aesthetic has barely been updated. It feels just as gross as ever. Good.<\/p>\n

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The new \u201cToxic Avenger\u201d also spins gold out of Troma\u2019s sillier tropes, like their outstanding over-reliance of on-the-nose ADR to fill out any otherwise empty moment. You can\u2019t let the audience get bored for a second in a Troma movie, nor can you risk anyone missing all your brilliant storytelling. That\u2019s why when Winston saves a cat at the beginning of \u201cThe Toxic Avenger,\u201d someone off-camera yells \u201cHe saved a cat!\u201d In Macon Blair\u2019s hands these silly flourishes are expertly amateurish. He\u2019s not above this source material. He\u2019s just got a little more money is all.<\/p>\n

Fans of \u201cThe Toxic Avenger\u201d are out there, and with any luck, Macon Blair\u2019s film will make a lot more of them. It\u2019s a heartwarming, horrifically violent homage to the most lovable dreck ever produced outside of the studio system. Those studios should sit up and take notice, because this remake feels fresher than the majority of the caped crusader movies Hollywood has been producing for years.<\/p>\n

Long live the Toxic Avenger. Long live Tromaville. They\u2019re sticking up their middle fingers in defiance of the studio system and proving \u2014 not for the first time \u2014 that the greatest avenger is, ironically, toxic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Toxic Avenger\u201d opens in theaters on Aug. 29.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nothing makes me feel older than the inescapable, soul-crushing passage of time, which waits for no one and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,48700,2839,47329,25706,22847,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-99588","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-macon-blair","10":"tag-movies","11":"tag-peter-dinklage","12":"tag-the-toxic-avenger","13":"tag-troma","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}